Busting the Busters

The longest-running tragicomic opera in science--the so-called Baltimore Affair--came to a climactic finale this past June. The case, the federal government’s best publicized investigation of scientific fraud, had been touted as a lesson for arrogant scientists: that truth is determined not by who has the Nobel Prizes but by the data. Like all good operas, however, it reversed itself in the final act, and the only sure lesson to emerge was that investigators in the Office of Research Integrity (ori) were bad at their job.